Timeout

Timeouts are used in Sports to discuss strategy, and as a tried and true parenting method for getting a child to calm down and behave properly. But I was thinking about the word itself: timeout. We are eternal beings who have been temporarily placed within the confines of time. Time is not our natural habitat, and a lot of the things we struggle with in life have to do with the clash between our eternal spirits and our mortal, time-bound bodies. But if we set aside a part of our life to take a timeout, to literally take the time out of our thoughts and our feelings, then we can draw closer to our Eternal Father, and our thoughts can become less time-bound and more eternal like His are. We are learning valuable lessons while we are trapped in time, but time is not our final state of being. We are bound for eternity, where all things will be present before our eyes. It is hard when we are thinking within the bounds of time to swallow that our righteous desire may have to wait years or decades to come to pass, but if we can take the time out of our thoughts, if we can view both our twelve and our thirty-two and our eighty-seven year old selves as being present simultaneously before us, then we can find the Godly patience to cheerfully bear the passage of time with confident assurance that the Lord’s timing is perfect. It is hard while we are in the hourglass to watch each grain of sand fall one by one, but when we reach out to our Father in Heaven and plead with Him to let us see things the way He sees them, then we can, for a moment, step outside of the hourglass, and see all of the sands of time arrayed before us so that when we must return to the hourglass we can be receive each grain of sand as it comes with gratitude, buoyed up with the vision of eternity to sustain us as we wait for our final deliverance from time.